Anime (And Music) On Your GBA

by Fennec Fox
February 04, 2003 00:00 AM PST

The mysteriously named "am3" shows off a new SmartMedia adapter that turns your GBA into a portable movie/music/whatever player. A copyright-respecting one, mind you.

As we discussed yesterday on ProNews, a new Toshiba-funded startup called am3 has plans in store to launch a GBA movie player by the end of May in Japan. Today, at a press conference in Tokyo, president Nozomu Yoshida gave the media their first look at the am3 adapter in action�and, from first impressions, the SmartMedia-compatible adapter appears to do everything Yoshida's company claims it can do.

The am3 adapter plugs into your Game Boy Advance like any other cartridge and accepts special 32-megabyte SmartMedia cards, which will be sold at toy and electronic shops nationwide. (You can't use regular SmartMedia cards with this adapter�only the ones am3 sells.) These cards can hold around 24 minutes of video or 5 hours of am3-compressed sound, and they'll initially be sold pre-encoded with anime episodes, movie trailers, and music. Later on, am3 plans to sell blank SmartMedia cards that users can upload media to via in-store kiosks; if that goes well, the company also has Internet file distribution in the works.

An example of the am3 adapter's video playback quality. Ash has changed a lot over the years...

At the press conference, am3 had demo units available showing an episode of Pok�mon running both on standard GBAs and the new GBA SP, due out February 14 in Japan. From what was visible at the conference, the video quality was very high, with a smooth framerate and zero artifacting on the GBA screen. The demo units didn't allow any control over the running video, but the retail adapter will have the usual rewind and fast-forward functions, along with an index allowing you to choose the audio or video you want to play. (This doesn't mean that games can use this technology�according to president Yoshida, am3-adapter game support was not part of the agreement they signed with Nintendo. Oh well.)

The adapter itself is slated to cost 2800 yen (about $23) in Japan, with 32MB cards costing anywhere from 2000 to 2300 yen. Individual anime episodes and music will cost between 200 and 500 yen ($1.67 to $4.12), and am3 is considering the idea of publishing entire seasons of anime shows (26 episodes) on a single CD-ROM for 6000 yen in the future. "The main target of the GBA is children," Yoshida said at the conference, "but more than half of all owners are high-school age or older. As a result, we will try to distribute as wide a range of content as possible." We'll get to see what they have in mind this May, when the am3 adapter is released in test-market quantities.

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The am3 adapter in action. As you can see, the size of the SmartMedia cards you stick into the thing requires that the adapter itself stick out a little bit, no matter what type of GBA you're using. You'll have a wide variety of card types to choose from, too, from wacky transparent colors to popular anime characters.